Best 232 quotes in «stoicism quotes» category

We're never unhappy until we remember why we're supposed to be unhappy.

We should not use philosophy like a herbal remedy, to be discarded when we're through. Rather, we must allow philosophy to remain with us, continually guarding our judgements throughout life, forming part of our daily regimen, like eating a nutritious diet or taking phisical exercise.

What are virtues, if not practiced evenly in both times of joy and in hardships?

[W]hat cause can there be for complaint, after all, in anything that was always bound to come to an end fading gradually away? What is troubling about that? [...] Moving to one's end through nature's own gentle process of dissolution - is there a better way of leaving life than that? Not because there is anything wrong with a sudden, violent departure, but because this gradual withdrawal is an easy route.

Whatever happens, happens such as you are either formed by nature able to bear it, or not able to bear it. If such as you are by nature form’d able to bear, bear it and fret not: But if such as you are not naturally able to bear, don’t fret; for when it has consum’d you, itself will perish. Remember, however, you are by nature form’d able to bear whatever it is in the power of your own opinion to make supportable or tolerable, according as you conceive it advantageous, or your duty, to do so.

What fortune has made yours is not your own.

What

When others inspire us, they tend to do so through the clear expression of these sketchy, adumbrated thoughts we ourselves have known but never had the perspicacity for formulate with certainty.

When pain comes, it must not derail you from your set virtues. If it does, you have failed to practice your virtues by going with the hype of pain.

There are two things that must be rooted out in human beings - arrogant opinion and mistrust. Arrogant opinion expects that there is nothing further needed, and mistrust assumes that under the torrent of circumstance there can be no happiness.

Unlike existing, living requires effort.

We all have problems. Or rather, everyone has at least one thing that they regard as a problem.

We can always choose not what we see but how we look at what we see.

[W]e can have the things we need for our ordinary purposes if we will only be content with what the earth has made available on its surface.

We have never tried to do most of the things we are dead sure we cannot do.

What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.

What would Heracles have been if he had said, "How am I to prevent a big lion from appearing, or a big boar, or brutal men?" What care you, I say? If a big boar appears, you will have a greater struggle to engage in; if evil men appear, you will free the world from evil men.

When you are disturbed by events and lose your serenity, quickly return to yourself and don't stay upset longer than the experience lasts; for you'll have more mastery over your inner harmony by continually returning to it.

When you run up against someone else’s shamelessness, ask yourself this: Is a world without shamelessness possible? No. Then don’t ask the impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them. The same for someone vicious or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole world class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.

Where you arrive does not matter as much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.

Why be concerned about others, come to that, when you've outdone your own self? Set yourself a limit which you couldn't even exceed if you wanted to, and say good-bye at last to those deceptive prizes more precious to those who hope for them than to those who have won them. If there were anything substantial in them they would sooner or later bring a sense of fullness; as it is they simply aggravate the thirst of those who swallow them.

Within, the only place where it is created, is the very last place most pursuers of happiness are likely to go.

You can be hurt, not by what others think of you, but by what you think of what they think or you think they think of you.

You cannot be blessed with the ability to be happy without being cursed with the ability to be unhappy.

You cannot attain everlasting peace of mind unless you stop seeing your mind as yourself and start seeing yourself as your mind’s guardian.

You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgement, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.

You should, I need hardly say, live in such a way that there is nothing which you could not as easily tell your enemy as keep to yourself.

You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, "What are your thinking about?" you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that.

Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been.

[Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.

When you give your items away, don’t keep the excess of your pride.

Hillary Clinton appears to believe in a form of stoicism - which is a tried and true life philosophy.